WHEN Mark Chapman fired four shots at John Lennon four decades ago, there seemed little doubt about who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder.
Immediately after the shooting outside the former Beatles star’s New York home on December 8, 1980, the killer dropped his gun and waited for police to arrive.
But a new documentary series is raising questions about whether Chapman could have been hypnotized or controlled by shadowy forces.
In the three-part Apple TV+ series, John’s friend reveals for the first time that the singer’s widow, Yoko Ono, asked him to investigate a possible conspiracy.
And he discovered that the American secret services had followed and wiretapped the peace campaigning couple because of their radical ideas.
Confidential documents show that the FBI considered them “dangerous” and all that President Richard Nixon wanted their activities stopped.
If the unemployed eccentric Chapman seems like an unlikely killer, the fact that the CIA had conducted experiments to see if mind control was possible only adds to the mystique of the murder.
Elliot Mintz, former spokesperson for John and Yoko, said: “I have never expressed this before.
“One of the things Yoko asked me to do was to investigate the various conspiracy theories after John’s murder.
“They were both convinced that the Dakota building, where their apartments were located, was bugged.”
Phone tapped
John and Yoko were perhaps the world’s best-known peace activists during the Vietnam War.
In 1969 they held ‘bed-ins for peace’ and John released the anti-war song Give Peace A Chance.
That year, Republican Nixon became US president and approved the secret carpet bombing of Vietnam’s neighbor Cambodia.
John thought his phone was tapped and saw men hanging around his door.
He once said: ‘I realized this was serious. They somehow came after me.”
While that may sound paranoid, the FBI was really on his tail. Confidential files revealed that agents had been instructed to follow and eavesdrop on the couple.
At the end of one document it says in capital letters: “All extremists should be considered dangerous.”
Elliot, 78, who was also a DJ on underground radio, says: “There were hundreds and hundreds of pages written to the Director of the FBI by Richard Nixon, where it was established that John and Yoko needed to be monitored, monitored and action taken. were put at the highest level of government to do something about the Lennon problem.”
After the Watergate scandal, Nixon was forced to resign in shame in 1974 and a year later American troops left Vietnam for good.
But John remained a thorn in the side of the American government.
He expressed distrust of the police, took illegal substances and his 1971 single Imagine asked people to think about a world without property or national borders.
In his final interview, recorded just hours before his death at the age of 40 and broadcast in the documentary, John said: “People have the power to make the society they want.”
Repeated attempts by British-born John to obtain American citizenship were unsuccessful. But he had largely kept a low profile in the five years before his assassination and did not appear to be a critic of President Jimmy Carter.
However, Chapman also had no clear motive. Several bizarre explanations have been given, with the killer once saying he did it to promote reading JD Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher In The Rye.
He modeled himself on the main character Holden Caulfield, who was a symbol of teenage rebellion.
But the prosecutor claimed that Chapman just wanted to be famous.
In one confession he said: “I thought if I killed someone I would turn into someone.”
Witnesses to the murder certainly thought his behavior was strange for a murderer.
Taxi driver Richard Peterson says on the show: “After he shot him, Chapman still stood there with the gun, took off his overcoat and pulled out that book and held it up – Catcher In The Rye.”
The police officers were equally astonished by Chapman. One, Tony Palma, asked him: “Do you realize what you’ve done?” and the suspect replied: “Yes, I just committed suicide, I’m John Lennon.”
A police lieutenant who interrogated Chapman reportedly told British lawyer and writer Fenton Bresler: “He looked like he could have been programmed.”
Chapman, a married man living in Hawaii, admitted to the murder, but Detective Ron Hoffman, who led the investigation, speculated that there could be more to the story.
He says: “We had the killer, we were positive about that, we wanted to rule out any possibility that he had no help.
“Was he alone, was there someone behind the lines, was it a conspiracy – all these questions started running through my head.” In Chapman’s room, Hoffman found his personal belongings carefully laid out on a desk, including his passport and an open Bible with the Gospel of John.
This indicated a premeditated act and there was no evidence that he corresponded with a co-conspirator, although the hypnosis theory still stands.
Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA ran a twenty-year top-secret project codenamed MKUltra, which used drug addicts and psychiatric patients for mind control experiments.
Chapman fits that profile because he had a history of both suicidal feelings and drug abuse.
His former girlfriend Jessica Blankenship, who met him at age 16 at a church retreat, recalled that he had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide.
She adds: “He especially loved The Beatles until John Lennon said they were more popular than Jesus Christ.”
Childhood friend Vance Hunter recalled that in one weekend Chapman took “eight hits of LSD 25, which was very powerful” and tried opium.
After the murder, Chapman was repeatedly interviewed by police and his own legal team.
In one tape, he described the seconds before he fired the gun: “All I remember is having a voice in my head saying, ‘Do it, do it, do it, do it.'”
Over the years since the murder, conspiracy theorists have abounded.
Fenton Bresler believed Chapman was the victim of a mind control program and blamed the CIA in his 1989 book The Murder Of John Lennon.
In the 2018 documentary Drugs As Weapons Against Us, John Potash suggested that the same agency played a role in John’s death.
But Potash has also claimed that the CIA had a hand in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur and the suicide of rocker Kurt Cobain.
Another mysterious detail is that President Ronald Reagan’s future assassin, John Hinckley Jr., also had a copy of Catcher In The Rye.
Reagan survived being shot at close range by Hinckley in 1981, just three months after John’s death.
But the idea that the former Beatle was murdered by the state has gathered few supporters. Even Chapman’s own lawyers did not raise that defense.
Instead, his legal team claims the miscarriage of justice in this case allowed a psychologically disturbed man to enter a guilty plea.
But the court decided that Chapman was of sound mind and in August 1981 he was sentenced to 20 years to life, and remains in prison.
David Suggs, who helped put together Chapman’s defense, says: “This is not a whodunnit. Our intention was to prove that this man was insane.”
Indeed, madness remains a credible reason for the murder, with Suggs adding: “He thought he was literally going to become Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.”
- John Lennon: Murder Without A Trial is now streaming on Apple TV+.